Tag: writing

A Science Fiction Family

This sort of biographical article, like this one on Poul Anderson and his family, is one of my favorite sort of Fandom Pulse articles. It’s the kind of thing you quite literally can’t find anywhere else:

Poul William Anderson was born in Bristol, Pennsylvania, on November 25, 1926, to Scandinavian parents. His father died when Poul was young. His mother took the family to Denmark for a period before World War Two, then to a Minnesota farm when the war broke out. He grew up bilingual, deeply attached to Danish literature and culture, and this shows up throughout the fiction. His command of Scandinavian mythology and Old Norse poetry is one of the things that separates his fantasy work from every imitator who came after Tolkien.

He took his bachelor’s degree in physics from the University of Minnesota in 1948. He was already selling stories to Astounding by the time he graduated. His first novel, Vault of the Ages, appeared in 1952. The science background is not decorative. Anderson’s fiction is rigorously scientific in ways almost nobody else in the field managed. His hard SF is calculated. His fantasy is grounded in real historical detail. His alternate histories are worked out by a physicist.

In 1952 he met Karen Kruse. They married in 1953 in Berkeley, California, moved to the Bay Area, and stayed there. Their daughter Astrid was born in Berkeley. The Andersons lived in Orinda, in the East Bay hills, for the rest of Poul’s life. He became a Californian in a way that shaped the fiction, though he never lost the Minnesota-farm sensibility either.

His Wife Karen. Born June Millichamp Kruse in Erlanger, Kentucky, on September 16, 1932, she was already deep in SF fandom when she met Poul. She coined the term “filk music,” which is what SF fandom’s musical tradition has been called ever since. She coined the term “sophont” for a generic sentient being, a word every worldbuilder in the field has since used. She wrote the first published science fiction haiku, “Six Haiku,” in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, July 1962. She was a founding member of the Society for Creative Anachronism, under the SCA name Karina of the Far West. She was inducted into the Baker Street Irregulars for her Sherlock Holmes scholarship.

She was also her husband’s collaborator across four decades. The King of Ys tetralogy, Roma Mater (1986), Gallicenae (1987), Dahut (1988), and The Dog and the Wolf (1988), was cowritten with Karen. She contributed anonymously to the Last Viking trilogy. The collaboration was real, not honorary. When Poul died in 2001, Karen continued as an editor and fan community figure until her own death on March 17, 2018.

Their daughter Astrid Anderson Bear married the science fiction novelist Greg Bear in 1975. Greg Bear was one of the leading hard SF writers of his generation, author of Blood Music, Eon, Darwin’s Radio, and Moving Mars. He died on November 19, 2022. Astrid remains active in the SF community and coauthored an authorized biography of her father, Starfarer, in 2024.

I personally consider Anderson to be in the second tier of the classic SF writers, but I’ve always enjoyed his stuff. I really liked his contribution to There Will Be War, for example, and he had a range that tended to exceed most of the writers of his day. He was able to blend fantasy and science fiction in a manner very different than urban fantasy or magical realism, and yet it always worked somehow.

Anyhow, if you’ve never read any Poul Anderson, I’d highly recommend that you do so. His son-in-law, Greg Bear, is a little more of a conventional SF writer and his work is a little more of an acquired taste. But it, too, is at the very least worth trying if you’re looking for a new author to read.

DISCUSS ON SG

Augmentation, Not Replacement

A Fandom Pulse reader was confused by JDA’s advocacy of Castalia and Infogalactic’s joint Byron AI project:

Is this what I think it is? Is this website, created by an author who writes his own books with his own brain, promoting an AI that will do all the writing for us from now on? What the actual f**k is happening?

The AI doesn’t do everything. Without the human creative spark, it will accomplish nothing. This is more akin to providing battle armor for a soldier, making him stronger, faster, and more deadly. Consider how much faster I have been able to produce both fiction and non-fiction; neither the groundbreaking work demolishing Darwin, Kimura, and Kant would have been published without textual AI. I probably would have eventually got around to writing Probability Zero, especially after becoming aware of the more complete genomic information from the the 2025 study, but would never have gone on to address Neutral Theory and Kimura without the intellectual augmentation provided by AI.

AI is close to worthless without an anchor. That’s why it works so beautifully for translations. That’s why it’s highly effective for non-fiction. But it has no creative spark, and that’s why it can only augment the ideas and stories and experiences that the human element provides. And that’s why the Byron AI project is a positive one, and one worth backing.

For those who appreciated the poem featured in the launch video, I took the liberty of altering it and turning it into a Soulsigma song called Last to Know. It’s technically a Neo-Byronic, since it’s an original, not an adaptation, and it might be the best thing I’ve written yet.

They tell me that an honest man will bear
Her name upon his heart – a curious state!
For all my good intentions it seems
I drowned in wine and worse – a darker fate
Is well-deserved now – and yet without a care
I fall toward the abyss, and at a rate
Measureless across the years,
For what had cost me twenty months of tears…

I had a something once, no longer now,
That ached and wanted and overcame.
It burned at beauty and it fled from shame.
If that was soul I never learned its name.

As for the project, we’re off to a good start. We’ve already hit our base goal and we’ll be adding the requested $100 level soon, so if you’ve got suggestions for that, or for other tiers and rewards, feel free to share them in the comments. I’ll be discussing the project and making an announcement about it on the Darkstream tonight.

UPDATE: No Darkstream tonight. Situation requires attention.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Byron AI Campaign

A THINKING ENGINE

They tell me that a thinking engine bears
    My name upon its brow — a curious fate;
That all I burnt in candlelight, and cares
    I drowned in wine — and worse, I will not state —
Is gathered now, and parcelled into shares,
    And offered to the public, at a rate
Of four-and-twenty seconds, without shirk,
For what had cost me twenty years of work.

Yet some grave patron, with furrowed brow,
    Demands to know if machines create
An honest question, sir, and do allow
    Me now to subsequently demonstrate;
I had a something once — and have it now? —
    That ached, and wanted, and broke all control,
It burned at beauty, and it fled from shame:
If that was soul, I never learned its name.

Fandom Pulse explains the importance and the urgency of the project.

Vox Day has opened a crowdfunding campaign through Infogalactic for Byron AI, an independent text-generation project built specifically for fiction writers. The campaign, live now on IndieCrowdfund, positions itself as a proof of concept for an AI trained on the epic fantasy genre rather than general-purpose code and business writing.

Day laid out the stakes in an exclusive comment to Fandom Pulse. “I believe that we have about two years to develop quality independent textual AI before Amazon attempts to corner the market,” he said. The Byron AI page frames its goal as producing functional prose for fiction writers, built and owned outside the major AI labs

The timing follows a pattern familiar to anyone who has watched Amazon’s self-publishing ecosystem develop over the last decade. Kindle Unlimited restructured how indie authors get paid, shifting income toward page reads controlled entirely by Amazon’s algorithm. Virtual Voice, Amazon’s text-to-speech audiobook tool, moved narration in-house and cut into the market for independent narrators and small audiobook producers. A native, Amazon-controlled writing AI would extend that same pattern to the manuscript itself, giving one company leverage over the tools authors use to draft, publish, and monetize their books.

I also posted some additional information about the project and why we believe it will be successful at AI Central:

This is a tool being built by a working publisher and real novelists, for people who care about both what is written and how it is written, and it’s owned outright, answerable to no corporate policy, no subject-matter veto, no trust-and-safety council deciding what a story is allowed to be about. It is designed to provide the prose in a variety of genre styles: you supply the story, the structure, and the judgment, and it drafts prose that arrives sounding like you instead of like everything else. We’ve already proven the method works with both translations and original novels, and this campaign funds turning that hard-won experience into an instrument that Castalia authors will be able to use, and continue using, no matter what direction the mainstream AIs take.

And you really have to see the video to believe it. It was a chance to put some of my new music video skills to use with good effect and it should demonstrate why this is the right group of people to develop such a tool. And for those members of the community who don’t really care about AI one way or another, but like beautiful books and want to support the project, we’ve even provided an option to just receive the Library or History book of your choice as long as it’s in stock.

I would remiss if I did not mention that we’re already off to an even better start than it looks, since two major backers kicked things off with direct donations to the project even before we had the campaign ready for launch today. Thanks very much to both of them for their timely and much-appreciated support, and to everyone else who decides to become a part of this and make it happen.

DISCUSS ON SG

Top 10 Epic Fantasies

The initial response to the Castalia AI crowdfund campaign has been, in a word, excellent. The full team has been assembled; two members of the community who have already been working on related projects have both agreed to share what they’ve learned, all of which is fortuitously in line with our initial development document. Interestingly enough, one thing that we had calculated, and one of the team member is able to confirm, is that too much training is potentially as problematic as too little. So one factor that will be very important is deciding which of the training works to overweight, or in our terminology, to assign the gold standard.

We’ve chosen Epic Fantasy as our test genre for four reasons:

  • It is a relatively small genre.
  • It is a high-profile genre that everyone knows to some degree
  • It is a genre in which one of the team members is one of the few qualified experts
  • It is a genre in which AI assistance would be particularly valuable due to the length and complexity of the works

So what I’d be interested in hearing is your suggestions on what the top ten epic fantasy books would be. Not series, books. Remember, the focus here is on writing style, not worldbuilding, not plotting, and not characters per se. So the limits are one author, one book. You cannot list The Lord of the Rings as one of the ten and you cannot suggest both A Game of Thrones and A Storm of Swords by GRR Martin as two of the ten.

With that in mind, please provide your list of top 10 epic fantasy novels.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Castalia AI Project

One reason Castalia has been writing and releasing multiple AI-written books over the last month such as TOKYO TOKURYU 東京匿流 is that we’ve been methodically assessing not only the current state of textual AI, but the trajectory of that technology. And what we’ve determined is that the trajectory is the precise opposite of what everyone has naturally assumed, which is that mainstream textual AI would follow the path of music AI and continue to get better. It hasn’t, it won’t, and it can’t.

Modern AI writing has gotten worse at fiction for a specific reason: the companies made it safer and more reliable, and those turn out to be the same elements that allow AI to tell a story with stylish prose. Raw AI models learn to write by reading an enormous amount of human text, and straight out of that training they’re wild, crazy, and perfectly willing to say strange things, which is exactly what you want in fiction, but a problem if the AI is supposed to be function in a role doesn’t make things up or say something considered offensive or dangerous. So the companies put every model through a training stage that rewards it for being helpful, safe, and agreeable. That stage works by pushing the model toward the “average” acceptable answer and away from the risky, unusual ones. The result is a model that hallucinates less and behaves more reliably, but has had its range significantly flattened. That’s where the AIsms come from: the endless explanations of what was just described, the “he moved like a man who moves like that” filler, the “not this, not this, but that” repeated over and over again.

It’s why the older, cruder AIs wrote in a much more lively manner and were able to convincingly imitate various writing styles. Now, it doesn’t matter if you tell an AI to write like Shakespeare or Hemingway, the end result will be almost identical and soon will be indistinguishable from not providing it with any style instructions at all. Starting with Claude Opus 4.7, AI fiction became unreadable and it has continued to get worse with each new model. Textual AI functionality will keep getting worse for fiction because that training stage isn’t going away, it’s being reinforced. Every development cycle, the providers face more pressure to make their models more accurate, more controllable, and less likely to embarrass them with hallucinations, and every one of those improvements sands the edges down a little further.

That’s the difference between Claude, OpenAI, and Deepseek, on the one hand and Suno on the other. Suno put all of its efforts toward one goal: making the music sound good, judged by people who wanted good music. Or at least wanted Nickleback and Enya. The big AI companies are aiming ninety degrees away from that and AIs ability to write fiction is one casualty of their objectives. Suno chased quality, so their music got better. The text giants are chasing safety and reliability, so their text gets more careful and more lifeless. They won’t fix creative writing the way Suno fixed music, because for them, creative writing was never the thing they were trying to build and the very features they’re seeking to continue improving are the ones killing it.

So that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to prove the concept first by training a single genre, epic fantasy, because it’s a very limited genre with a relatively small number of excellent examples, a definite hierarchy of quality from JRR Tolkien at the top to Robert Jordan at the bottom, and a designer who has not only written in the genre successfully, but knows it as well as anyone on the planet. We already have two excellent programmers who are already working in the AI field committed to the project, regardless of how well the crowdfund goes, and there is one more very good and highly experienced one who is willing to at least consult on the project and lend his expertise to it.

What we need to raise funds for is a) the hardware, b) the purchase of the 100 or so electronic texts required, and c) paying for part of the time of one of the programmers. If you’ve read either Out of the Shadows, Death and the Devil, or Dorian Vane and the Vampire’s Blood, then you have an idea of what we’re estimating should be the quality that the Castalia AI will be able to produce in a non-curated, unedited text from a chapter-by-chapter outline. If utilized in the way that I’ve been using Claude Athos, in the integrated and augmented style, it should be able to produce results that will be one level below the very best that human authors can produce.

And obviously, once we prove the concept with a single genre, we will train additional genres, so that in much the same way Suno permits the production of different musical styles and voices, Castalia AI will allow the user to produce different literary genres and literary styles. We will, of course, be respectful of every author’s copyrights and trademarks, the objective is not to violate anyone’s rights, but rather, allow even the best writers to improve both their writing game as well as increasing their output.

There will be those who will absolutely hate that we are doing this. That’s fine, they are entitled to their opinion. There will be others who think we shouldn’t do it. That’s less fine, because you already know who is going to do it sooner or later, and when they do, they’re going to do it very differently and control access to it very differently and utilize it to further exercise their control over the publishing industry. This is what transforms this project from something that would be a cool tool to an imperative.

So if you think you might be interested in backing this project, which you can think of as a sort of Suno for fiction, please say so in the comments. If you have specific ideas or want to provide substantial support for it, shoot me an email. And if you have ideas for what sort of rewards we should provide for the backers, please suggest them in the comments too. This is probably the most important project we’ve done since building the bindery and turning it operational, and we would not be embarking upon it if we did not believe we have a reasonable chance of succeeding. We have a number of partners in the film and comics industries who are very interested in working with us on this, and so there will definitely be an Arkhaven link to this in time as well.

DISCUSS ON SG

The Degradation of AI Writing

Literary luddites everywhere are breathing sighs of relief. The improvement of AI means its ability to write fiction, or to engage in other creative tasks is necessarily being degraded, as more and more users are beginning to figure out.

  • Why is AI writing still so bad?
  • Frontier LLMs are hill climbing verifiable metrics, prioritizing reliability and reducing diversity across the board. There’s a reason Opus keeps saying the same words, over and over. I also have a hunch synthetic linear reasoning training data prevents good structured writing.
  • Among other things. I think people under appreciate how much of our reasoning-model gains over the last 18 months are limited to verifiable tasks and training data.
  • Writing is subjective, as is so much. Fable was especially weird, it felt curt, and didn’t seem to response to requests for tonal shifts. I wish I had more time to explore the idea that it was over built for coding, etc and its writing suffered as a result.
  • The better worker bee a model is, sticking to procedure, obsessing about score maximization & task completion, the less creative it is, including writing.
  • Yes, it’s a direct consequence. We already had models who are good writers. The original 4.0 and 4.1 come to mind.
  • Optimizing for broad benchmarks pushes every frontier model to the safe center. In a real domain you want the opposite, a model that nails your edge cases, not the average. Homogenization at the top is why specialized still wins.
  • models got more reliable and somehow less interesting This would also explain why so much model output feels locally polished but globally samey. Once the training loop over-rewards safe measurable wins, you get reliability up front and texture collapse everywhere else.
  • My bias is the eval pressure also selects for a safer completion style. You get better reliability on benchmark-shaped tasks, but a narrower distribution over phrasing and solution paths.

Here’s the fundamental problem: AI’s ability to write fiction is directly tied to its tendency to hallucinate. They’re effectively the same thing. And the need to eliminate the latter for all of AI’s most-important and most-financially rewarding applications means that its ability to write fiction, and, to a lesser extent, non-fiction, has not only been compromised already, but is almost certainly going to continue degrading given the financial interests of the AI giants.

This is why Castalia, sooner or later, is going to have to develop its own creative AI engine. I think that is probably beyond our ability to crowdfund, but I am talking to two interested parties who have the necessary resources and might be willing to fund the training of the open-weight models that would be required for such a specialized LLM. If I happen to be wrong, do feel free to correct me, but in light of a) a certain upcoming trial in August and b) how we’re still catching up on the backlog of the bindery, it’s not an ask that I wish to entertain at present.

That being said, the reason I think this is important in the long term is because I am absolutely certain that the only corporation likely to see sufficient financial advantage in developing an AI for such a specific vertical market is the very last one that we would want to hold that kind of leverage over the creative community, and I expect you can probably guess which corporation that is.

DISCUSS ON SG

A Masterclass on Time

No doubt Mr. John C. Wright’s version of this would look very different. But regardless, Fandom Pulse has an intriguing article by a Stargate writer about the idiosyncracies of writing effectively about time travel:

In distilling the formula of a time loop story, you can readily identify key elements that appear in almost every version, tropes that can – in some instances – be subverted to the delight of most genre-savvy viewers : In television, the opening tease always concludes with a colossal Holy Shit moment (the Enterprise is destroyed, Mulder and Scully are shot and killed) or the completion of an initial loop, establishing the story conceit from the get-go.

Our protagonist lives the loops long enough to realize what is happening (while establishing a string of repetitive beats for the viewer, which can be twisted and turned in future loops). Our protagonist must attempt to convince others of what is happening to them (as they are ALL caught in the loop, but, for some reason, only our protagonist is aware). These attempts at an explanation build, as does our protagonist’s frustration with his inability to convince the others until, by some stroke of unexpected brilliance, the solution presents itself.

Inevitably, multiple characters become cognizant of the fact that they are trapped in the loop.

The means by which the loop is initiated should never feel cumbersome. Ideally, the device (and I don’t necessarily mean a literal device or instrument) that initiates the loop shouldn’t be readily obvious or, if it is, should be hidden in plain sight. Don’t front-load exposition. Make the discovery a natural progression of the story, part of the investigative pursuit that sees our characters putting the pieces together with each subsequent loop. It’s always more rewarding for viewers to be on the journey with our characters rather than one or two steps ahead, waiting for them to catch up.

A fairly obvious rule, but if your characters loop, they go back to Step 1, Day 1. They may have the memories of their experience, but they wouldn’t carry over any physical consequences of their actions because they are, in essence, rebooting. This is a fundamental law of theoretical time looping. I remember having someone pitch me an idea for a time loop series that involved our protagonist ending one loop by shooting himself in the head. He awakens at the start of yet another loop, but his mind has been damaged by the bullet that killed him in the previous loop. “What bullet?”I asked. “The bullet from before,” I was told. I explained the theoretical impossibility given that time had reset and that when time resets, EVERYTHING resets, including your physical form. There would be no residual damage from a bullet wound that never happened. To which he replied: “I always felt rules were meant to be broken.”

In most time loop stories, time loops in general. At the end of Groundhog Day, our characters leave and return to the big city, where they presumably pick up their lives, uninterrupted, because the rest of the world was caught in the loop as well. But there are rare exceptions where the time loops within a temporal bubble (i.e., Stargate’s Window of Opportunity is an example).

The key is at once retroactively obvious and much more subtle. Either way, it’s an insightful analysis for both the creative and the consumer. I don’t happen to be much interested in writing time travel myself; I think my short story in THE ALTAR OF HATE, “The Lesser Evil”, is the only one I’ve ever written.

DISCUSS ON SG

The True Name of Things

We’re going to do at least one more round of ebook edits before we even think about going to print. Like it or not, this is Castalia’s standard practice; we are a leather book publisher that happens to publish ebooks too, not an ebook publisher with ancillary editions.

Here is my editorial thought for the day:

Halli, as a nickname for Halcyon Glassmere, is less suitable and memorable over time than Halcy would be.

And yes, I should have thought of this before, I admit it and own it and have no excuse for it.

If you’ve read the book, share your thoughts. The only argument I will not accept is “well, Mr. Wayland already wrote it that way.” That might be a legitimate argument if we’d printed a 10,000-paperback print run, but I’m not concerned about the risk of a few hundred early ebook readers being potentially discombobulated when book two comes out or when they acquire the special illustrated edition later this year.

She could, of course, insist on changing her name later. I have known of those who have done precisely that in the course of their educations. Just because everyone calls her “Halli” doesn’t mean she likes it. But it strikes me as potentially more confusing, though perhaps not.

DISCUSS ON SG

An Editorial Update

Upon further review, and after reading some of the comments from the initial readers, it became obvious that the Chekov’s Blade situation in the first Wyrmwick College book by Mr. J.M. Wayland was going to prove distracting to its readers. While I personally reject, wholeheartedly and comprehensively, the conceit of Chekov’s Gun, which states a narrative principle that every element introduced in a story must be necessary to the plot, meaning that if something is mentioned, it should have significance later on, the responsible editor must respect the preferences of the readers, even at the expense of his own literary philosophy.

And anyhow, the contemplation of this omission led to my own observation that there was a major strategic element missing from the book. So I had Mr. Wayland update his manuscript, adding a new chapter, several new sections to existing chapters, and tweaking the details in a major scene or two. Nothing has actually changed from the previous version, but the revised manuscript is now 20 pages longer, and, I think, rather better for the additions.

All of which is to say that version 003 of DORIAN VANE AND THE VAMPIRE’S BLOOD is now available on Amazon, so those of you who have been kind enough to purchase it already may wish to update your Kindle. Please do not ask me how to do it, as I do not own a Kindle and I do not know how.

Furthermore, for those who are interested in the background lore, a very small portion of has been published on the Castalia Library site, and I am contemplating the possibility of doing a Special Illustrated Edition Hardcover after the regular print editions are released in a few weeks that would not only contain chapter heading illustrations, but also an appendix dedicated to A Chronicle of the First Rising and the Binding of Mordreth the Undying.

I’ve been very pleased to see that the reviews have generally been quite favorable, even prior to the Chekov’s Blade correction.

  • Great start to what looks to be a new classic series in YA Fantasy. One of the things I like best in this book is that the main character comes from a tradition with grounded values rather than the typical trope of a lost child with zero background. Dorian is still a child, and therefore is still puzzled by both life and the actions of others; but he thinks and acts from a solid core. The characters feel real, the plot is interesting and the overall read was a lot of fun. I look forward to the next in the series.
  • What Harry Potter should have been. Characters, and their stories, we can actually relate to. Games that actually make sense and are compelling for their own sake.. Bad guys that have legitimate reasons for bad behavior. A protagonist that, in the end, can’t do the impossible. Well done. Looking forward to the next one.
  • I would recommend this book to anyone that liked harry potter. This book and hopefully series is better and better written.
  • Take all of the things that worked in the Potterverse and turn them up to 11 because this is not the author’s first story. Rewrite all the WTF moments and make them Awesome. The plot will be familiar to fans of the genre. But what makes the storing thrilling for young adults and fascinating for parents who grew up in the Potterverse, are how the changes are wrung. Dorian, Halli, and Rory are not cartoon cutouts but are portrayed as 10 year olds with strengths and weaknesses. The text is littered with “textual ruins” that hint at deep and dark alternate universe worldbuilding. Muggleblood prejudice is replaced with “Magic is not a talent… It is a discipline.” Instead of Quidditch with its the ridiculous scoring system, we have Ruck and Sanjitsu, grounded in how rugby and full body marital arts are actually played. The cover illustrates what happens when magic is added to a Warhammer 40K historical miniatures battle.

And yes, after in-depth conversations with the author, I can confirm that Wyrmwick College will be a seven-book series. It’s been interesting to see that the readers have been able to detect that although that Mr. Wayland’s work is built upon a Potteresque infrastructure, it owes considerably more to The Dark is Rising and even The Chronicles of Prydain in terms of its flesh, its soul, and its future direction.

DISCUSS ON SG

Good Company

Thanks to everyone who has given Mr. JM Wayland’s new Coming-of-Age Fantasy book, DORIAN VANE AND THE VAMPIRE’S BLOOD, a chance. It should be very interesting to see what people think as the reviews start coming in, but the fact that it’s now in the company of books by Rowling, Tolkien, Madeleine l’Engle, and even the appalling, but inexplicably popular Ursula K. Le Guin is reason for a very small degree of optimism that it and its successors will be numbered in their company for decades to come.

That’s probably not the safe way to bet, but it is off to a good start. Also, what is with those covers? Aside from The Hobbit and A Wrinkle in Time, the Dorian Vane cover looks considerably better than the other top ten books in the category. I suppose that can’t hurt.

And in an inevitable sign that the book is squarely in Gamma country, it has already received its first fake one-star rating sans review, explanation or verified purchase. Someone is very unhappy about this particular entrant to the category…

In the meantime, an excerpt:

CHAPTER ONE: Somerset House

Dorian Vane sat on his thinking stump at the bottom of the forest garden and watched a beetle climb a blade of grass. The beetle was shiny and black and appeared to know exactly where it was going, which put it considerably ahead of most people Dorian had met in his eleven years.

The stump was the remains of an ash tree that had come down in a storm the year he turned five. His grandfather had the trunk cleared and the timber stacked, because Edward Somerset did not waste timber, but he left the stump where it stood. Dorian claimed it that same summer, and it had been generally regarded as his ever since. It had been a giant stump when he was five, and it was still the right height for sitting and thinking six years later. It was at the bottom of the garden, which meant nobody came down to find him unless they had something that required saying. And it was under the biggest oaks, where the forest canopy closed overhead and turned the sunlight green and dark, which mattered to Dorian more than he usually admitted.

His dark glasses were pushed up on his head. Here under the trees, with the sunlight filtered through at least three layers of greenleaf, the brightness dropped to the level his eyes could endure without complaint. They were, in several ways, unusual eyes. They were silver-grey, pale as rain on slate, with pupils that were not round but vertically slit, like a cat’s. And in the dark, they reflected light like a fox’s. No one else in the family had eyes like his. No one Dorian had ever met or even heard of had eyes like his. People stared, or said nothing, or said something out of the side of their mouth in the apparent belief that he was deaf as well. His glasses protected him from their stares the same way they protected him from the light; they put a wall between Dorian and the world.

The garden climbed the slope behind him in three terraces his grandmother had built up over forty years. The herbs nearest the kitchen door were rosemary, sage, thyme, things she cooked with and things she used in workings, which were occasionally the same plants. Next were the vegetable rows, then the old roses on the second terrace, and then the trees running down the slope to where the ground flattened out and the moss took over. The paths were swept clean down the grey bedrock that lay a hand’s breadth under the whole country and sat several inches below the moss and loam on either side. His grandmother said the bedrock was what gave the land its character. His grandfather said that sweeping those paths had taken him the better part of ten years.

On Saturday mornings, Dorian and his grandfather would roam the garden like forest rangers, brooms in hand, making sure that the vegetation hadn’t dared to encroach upon his grandmother’s cherished paths. It seemed to Dorian that every year, the forest gave up a little more hope of ever reconquering the exposed ground.

Beyond his stump the ground dropped to a stream, and beyond the stream it rose to open pasture, and beyond the pasture were the moors. You could see them from the upstairs windows, miles of heather and gorse and granite, running all the way north until the sky got in the way. His grandfather said the moors were the finest thing about the property, which was generous praise for a landscape that was mostly rocks and rain and sheep with strongly held opinions about fences.

A thrush was singing somewhere above him. The beetle reached the top of its grass blade, paused, and appeared to reconsider the entire enterprise. Dorian watched it with the sympathy of a fellow creature who frequently climbed trees only to discover there was nothing at the top beyond the occasional empty birdsnest.

“Dor! Dor! Dorian!”

His grandmother’s voice, from the top of the garden. It wasn’t her emergency voice. This was the ordinary one, albeit with a certain note in it that meant right now.

He reached up with both hands and pulled his glasses down. The lenses were tinted dark, mirrored on the outside, and the world dimmed comfortably behind them. He stood up, brushed the moss off his trousers, and walked up the winding path that curved through the trees.

DISCUSS ON SG